Most organisations are still getting AI adoption wrong, offering their people either reassurance without accountability, or accountability without reassurance. The Access Group did both at once, and a year on, the results speak for themselves.

Kate Hassler, Group Director of Brand & Comms at The Access Group, takes you inside what a genuinely embedded AI operating model looks like, not in theory, but in practice. She'll share direct examples of how her team uses AI day to day, how The Access Group brought shadow AI out of the shadows and into a governed, enterprise-wide programme, and why pairing empathy with non-negotiable expectation is what made the culture shift stick. She'll also show how baking brand guardrails directly into AI tools, rather than policing outputs after the fact, transformed the consistency and pace of everything the marketing team produces.

She'll also challenge one of the most dangerous assumptions in B2B marketing right now: that cutting junior headcount is a rational response to AI capability.   The organisations quietly hollowing out their entry-level pipelines today are the ones who will be scrambling for senior AI-fluent talent in 2030 and paying for that short-termism accordingly. Today's juniors are AI natives. You need a human at the start and end of every piece of work, and the apprenticeship pipeline that builds those humans does not pause for a technology cycle.

If your team still treats AI as a separate initiative with a beginning, middle and end, this session shows you what it looks like when it becomes the route you commit to.
 

What will the audience learn?

• How to build a genuinely embedded, enterprise-wide AI operating model
• How to bring shadow AI out of the shadows and into governed practice
• Why pairing empathy with non-negotiable expectation is what makes culture change stick
• How to bake brand guardrails into AI tools rather than policing outputs after the fact
• Why cutting junior headcount now could cost you senior AI-fluent talent later

Your buyer built their shortlist before you knew they were in the market. They read a community thread, asked a peer, ran a query through an AI assistant and settled on a list you never appeared on. By the time a form gets filled, the evaluation is over. This is not a funnel with a leak. It is a funnel that moved somewhere you cannot see.

Geoffrey Sidari, Chief Innovation Officer and Head of AI at Marketbridge, takes you inside the research on how B2B buying actually works now. 83% of decision-makers self-research before they contact sales. 55% cannot tell which sources to trust. Peer recommendations are the most trusted source at 73%, ahead of vendor websites and AI chatbots. Buyers spend roughly 17% of the journey with suppliers, and any one rep gets about 5% of that time. The journey did not get longer. It went dark.

He will show why the standard response- more content and more lead capture- impacts the problem, and what’s working: earning trust in the communities where buyers gather, becoming visible in the AI answers that now shape shortlists, and orchestrating proprietary intelligence across the platforms you already own. He will also challenge the most comfortable assumption in the room, that the channels you can measure are the channels that matter. Your dashboard reports the 17% you can see. It says nothing about the peer conversation or the AI answer that made the decision. Marketers optimizing the visible last click are tuning a system the buyer already left.

If your pipeline still assumes the buyer will raise their hand, this session shows you what it takes to win the decision that happens before they do.

What will you learn?

• How B2B buyers research, decide and build shortlists before they contact sales
• Why trust, not reach, now determines which vendors make the shortlist How to become visible in the AI answers and peer communities that shape buying decisions
• Why the channels you can measure are not the channels that decide How to orchestrate proprietary intelligence above the platform layer

Nearly half of FTSE 100 companies have appointed a Chief AI Officer. Most of those appointments happened in the last two years. AI has moved from experimentation to implementation, and marketing operations are being remodelled underneath it, ready or not.

The question facing marketing leaders is no longer whether AI will change the organisation, but how deliberately they choose to design what comes next. But most organisations are still trying to fit AI into operating models designed for a different era. That gap, 83% of executives say AI is a top priority, only 23% have a comprehensive strategy for it, is where this session lives.

In this session, Roland Glass is joined by James Poulter, author of AI at Work, to explore what it takes to move beyond fragmented AI experiments towards a coherent, human-centred AI operating model.

This is not a conversation about humans versus AI. It is about designing organisations in which each does what it does best, and giving marketing leaders the confidence to take control of that design.

The future isn't one team model. It's the ability to design the right one.

What you'll learn

Expect a framework, not a checklist. Roland and James will get into where agents genuinely belong in marketing work, which human capabilities become more valuable rather than less, and what it actually takes to move from fragmented AI experiments to a deliberate, coherent operating model.

As AI reshapes how marketing teams work and perform, Justina Gilbert makes the case that the more the world speeds up, the more leaders need to slow down and be human, with ourselves and each other.

This isn’t a clinical talk. It’s a real one. Justina draws on her own lived experience of burnout, and the moment she came dangerously close to losing everything, to show what happens when high-performing leaders keep pushing without ever pausing to check in with themselves or their teams.
As a trained Mental Health First Aider and MHFA England instructor, Justina will share STARS: a simple, practical model for building everyday resilience, covering how to stop, think, ask for help, restore your energy, and seek support, for yourself and the people you lead.

For CMOs and marketing leaders navigating constant disruption, this session offers a rare space to pause and reconnect with what good leadership actually requires: honesty, listening, and making time for yourself as well as each other. Because you never know, having more conversations like this could save a life.

What will the audience learn?

The STARS model: a simple, five-step framework (Stop, Think, Ask for help, Restore, Seek support) for building everyday resilience in themselves and their teams
• How to recognise the early warning signs of burnout, in themselves and in the people they lead
• Why honest conversations and active listening are a leadership skill, not a soft extra, especially through periods of AI-driven change
• Practical ways to build “energisers” into a busy schedule, and how to spot personal “energy-zappers” before they take hold
• How to create a team culture where people feel safe to ask for help
 

AI leaders say that 95% of what B2B marketers do will soon be done better by AI. Employers and B2B buyers are buying the idea and investing in tokens over talent. Dr Paul Marsden, chartered psychologist, is investigating how humans can fight back and thrive in the AI era. Drawing on positive psychology, the evidence-based science of human flourishing, this session will reveal practical moves B2B marketers can make today to future-proof their careers, prospects and livelihoods.

What will the audience learn?

• The human advantage: where to play and how to win
• The AI slop machine: how to cut through
• AI-proof human character strength